Speaking of Ukraine I’m skeptical that Russia will willingly accept an anti-Russian and pro-Western Ukraine but that’s what Alexander Vershbow says in this piece at The Atlantic Council:

The recent US debate about Russia has focused mainly on Moscow’s disinformation, propaganda, and interference in our elections. But Russia’s aggression against Ukraine remains the original sin and the biggest threat. It’s not just Ukraine’s survival as an independent, democratic state that is on the line, but the future of an international order based on the rule of law rather than the law of the jungle.

That’s why it’s good news that, despite fears that President Donald Trump might throw Ukraine under the bus for the sake of a reset with Moscow, the administration has taken a clear position that better relations with Russia are impossible without a resolution of the Ukraine crisis. Administration officials have developed a reasonably coherent strategy aimed at achieving a diplomatic solution, and they have appointed a capable diplomat, Kurt Volker, to carry it out.

In my opinion arming the Ukrainians or, worse, admitting Ukraine to NATO is one of the worst blunders we could make.

I found this passage something between puzzling and amusing:

For the first time since 2014, the Kremlin may be looking for a way out of the Donbas. While the Crimean annexation has been a winner for Russian President Vladimir Putin in domestic terms, his plans for a second secessionist rump state across southern Ukraine—the “Novorossiya” project—did not play out as intended. Three years of occupation and low-level conflict in the Donbas have strengthened Ukrainian national identity and resolve, without seriously derailing the reform process or implementation of the EU association agreement.

What Putin didn’t account for is that when you exclude ethnic Russians from Ukrainian elections the results are even more anti-Russian than would otherwise be the case. That’s not exactly a formula for pacifying the situation in a reunited Ukraine, unless your plan is for massive ethnic cleansing.

The Russians are capable of making enormous mischief, not just in their own near abroad but right here in the United States as we have seen. If we weren’t behaving as aggressively towards them as we have been for the last 25 years, they might not have decided that we’re their enemies.

Somehow this post at Intersection Project manages to comment on Russia’s “Kosovo fixation”:

Russia’s policy is increasingly perceived by the Balkan states on their way to the EU and NATO as an approach to “disrupt NATO, divide Europe”. The region’s role might expand against the backdrop of the confrontation between the Kremlin and the West. Yet the problem is, peace-keeping missions in the region are far from being fully successful. Support for anti-Western conservative forces and propaganda which enhances interethnic intolerance, increases levels of distrust between stakeholders involved in post-war reconstruction and reforms are regarded as destabilizing efforts by Moscow’s opponents.

manages to devote 1,600 words to the topic without using the words “Slav” or “Orthodox” once, a remarkable feat, is conspicuous for what is missing rather than what it reveals.

For the last 150 years positioning itself as the leader of Slavs and Orthodoxy has been a key Russian interest. After the collapse of the Soviet Union that interest has raised its head again. It remains very popular in Russia. Expect the Russians to continue to pursue that interest. That’s the way the incentives point for Russia’s politicians.

As a test of that hypothesis are the Russians fomenting separatist movements everywhere in Europe? Or are they just supporting Slavs and the Orthodox in the former Yugoslavia (and Ukraine)? I don’t believe that the Catalan voted for independence due to Russian agitation but I’m always willing to learn.

There’s plenty to read about the Democrats’ retaining the governorship in Virginia by electing yet another Clintonista in Virginia. I just want to make one quick point.

Many in the media are calling the holding action a referendum on Trump. Is it? Or is it yet another indication that people are moving?

One of the largest single indicators for how much a county has recovered from the recession is whether it contains a state capitol or is adjacent to Washington, DC. Just about every indication is that the DC suburbs held the governor’s chair for the Democrats.

Be careful of reading too much into it. It may not be a formula for national victory.

Let’s just acknowledge that providing health care, health care insurance, or retirement income are not parts of the federal government’s list of responsibilities. To get there you need to treat certain clauses extremely expansively, assigning them meanings far different from the way in which they were originally construed. Nonetheless, I have reservations about the argument being made by Texan Drew White at RealClearPolicy urging that the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) be abandoned to the states:

It’s true that CHIP may be slightly better than other federal programs such as Medicaid since it provides states with far more flexibility to administer the program. Moreover, households receiving CHIP benefits are routinely expected to share in some of the costs, and are typically better consumers of care than those enrolled in Medicaid. But CHIP is far from perfect. And with its reauthorization up for debate, Congress has the opportunity to go one step further and truly empower states and improve CHIP in the process.

First and foremost, CHIP should be a fully state-administered program, not a federal responsibility. The federal regulation of health insurance only drives up premiums, hinders market forces that reduce the cost of care, and perpetuates a cartel-like system between insurers and government that leaves patients with few options. If, instead, states had full control over this program with no federal strings attached — similar to a block grant of Medicaid — they would have the ability to tailor it to the needs of their own residents. This would improve health outcomes for the children enrolled in the program and lower total costs as well. States could use the resulting savings for any number of policy reforms, such as health savings accounts for lower income households or funding for state-based high-risk pools serving those with preexisting conditions.

The problem occurs when the states don’t fulfill their responsibilities. Without federal intervention Southern states would still have segregated schools if not segregated restrooms.

What’s the line of demarcation for federal action? I think there needs to be one but I’m uncertain about where it should be drawn or how it should be effected.

At the Washington Post Marc Lynch, né “Abu Aardvark”, gazes into his crystal ball to discern the significance of the recent Saudi purge:

While the full scope and ultimate outcome of the weekend’s arrests remain unclear, the new developments should be understood in the context of interaction between Mohammed bin Salman’s short window for domestic power consolidation and Saudi Arabia’s unsettled regional position. Mohammed bin Salman’s domestic political ambitions and foreign policy moves have unfolded in a deeply uncertain environment, with both domestic power and regional order in an unprecedented state of flux.

The Yemeni missile attack, Hariri’s resignation, and the Saudi arrests would ordinarily be viewed as events of primarily local significance. In today’s context, however, they have sparked fears of a dangerous and unpredictable regional escalation against Iran. Since the Arab uprisings of 2011, Gulf regimes such as Saudi Arabia have lived in existential fear of the sudden eruption of popular mobilization, while pursuing unusually interventionist foreign policies across the region. The extended Saudi power transition at home and its erratic pattern of failed foreign policy interventions must be understood within this wider regional context.

I’m somewhat surprised that Syria scholar Lynch doesn’t mention Saudi support for Islamists in Syria in his account.

IMO if these steps mark an advance to war with Iran on the part of the Saudis, it won’t be a debacle or a quagmire. It will be the end of the House of Saud.

In recognition of the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 (it took place on November 7 of the Gregorian calendar; according to the Julian calendar used by Russia at the time it was October 25-26), a number of articles have been written. Writing at the Washington Post Anne Applebaum, who provides a good account of what actually happened, is alarmed that Bolshevism is being embraced today:

History repeats itself and so do ideas, but never in exactly the same way. Bolshevik thinking in 2017 does not sound exactly the way it sounded in 1917. There are, it is true, still a few Marxists around. In Spain and Greece they have formed powerful political parties, though in Spain they have yet to win power and in Greece they have been forced by the realities of international markets, to quietly drop their “revolutionary” agenda. The current leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, also comes out of the old pro-Soviet far left. He has voiced anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-Israel, and even anti-British (and pro-IRA) sentiments for decades — predictable views that no longer sound shocking to a generation that cannot remember who sponsored them in the past. Within his party there is a core of radicals who speak of overthrowing capitalism and bringing back nationalization.

In the United States, the Marxist left has also consolidated on the fringes of the Democratic Party — and sometimes not even on the fringes — as well as on campuses, where it polices the speech of its members, fights to prevent students from hearing opposing viewpoints, and teaches a dark, negative version of American history, one calculated to create doubts about democracy and to cast shadows on all political debate. The followers of this new alt-left spurn basic patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or the Middle East. As in Britain, they don’t remember the antecedents of their ideas and they don’t make a connection between their language and the words used by fanatics of a different era.

[…]

By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right do not want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans but radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky, they offer a false and misleading vision of the past. They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts. They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use “Christianity” as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are “Christians” fighting against “Muslims” — or against “liberals” if there are no “Muslims” available.

To an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his “illegitimate” opponents. Law and Justice, the illiberal nationalist ruling party in Poland, has sorted its compatriots into “true Poles” and “Poles of the worst sort.” Trump speaks of “real” Americans, as opposed to the “elite.” Stephen Miller, a Trump acolyte and speechwriter, recently used the word “cosmopolitan,” an old Stalinist moniker for Jews (the full term was “rootless cosmopolitan”), to describe a reporter asking him tough questions. “Real” Americans are worth talking to; “cosmopolitans” need to be eliminated from public life.

The question that I think should be considered is why the revolution failed and why it failed so quickly because fail it did. Within a year it had already abandoned the principles on which it was putatively based, as noted by Jairus Banaji at The Wire:

Given the fact that Bolshevism stemmed from a tradition of revolutionary socialism, the most startling fact about the revolution itself was how rapidly the goal of workers’ control of the economy was given up. “Workers’ control had been abandoned in the winter of 1917–18,” Carr states laconically in The Interregnum 1923–1924. “The factory committees launched the slogan of workers’ control of production quite independently of the Bolshevik party”, but it was the “willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a central reason for their growing appeal”, so runs a crucial argument in Steve Smith’s book Red Petrograd. Yet Vladimir Lenin saw the factory committees “as a means of helping the Bolshevik Party to seize power”. They were, for him, simply organs of insurrection, not, as the Turin factory councils would be for Antonio Gramsci in 1919, “embryos of the proletarian state”.

or, in other words, that transition was baked in from the very beginning. At the Wall Street Journal David Satter points to the lack of acceptance of fundamental rights distinct from the state as the basis of the problem:

Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition of private property, their real goal was spiritual: to translate Marxist- Lenin ist ideology into reality. For the first time, a state was created that was based explicitly on atheism and claimed infallibility. This was totally incompatible with Western civilization, which presumes the existence of a higher power over and above society and the state.

The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.

But the Bolsheviks’ influence was not limited to these countries. In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”

One of those fundamental rights, possibly the most fundamental, is the right to property and, obviously, the right to property is incompatible with the absolutist goals of regimes like Lenin’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, or, more recently, Castro’s or Chavez’s.

The urge to power is a universal. In Aristotelian terms it is essential rather than accidental and, consequently, is not just an unfortunate incident. And, like pride or anger, it is not self-limiting. Failures are attributed to power being not quite absolute enough.

I’m reading a number of people talking about a land invasion of North Korea. IMO nothing could be more insane. I hope that isn’t the way the wind is blowing.

As I’ve said before, we shouldn’t engage in preventive wave against North Korea but our response if attacked should be to eliminate the threat conclusively. That means a very large number of North Koreans would die.

Like most others I have no idea what the purge that has taken place in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia means or what its implications are. Here’s what Pat Lang says:

IMO what we are seeing here is the consolidation of power within the Salman branch of the Sudairi side of the Saudi royal family.

[…]

IMO this purge is intended to achieve the intimidation or removal of those who are the crown princes’ rivals on the secular side of Saudi society. Mit’ab bin Abdullah was the head of SANG, a non MODA armed force for decades. Bin Talal is a major financial power in the world.

If there is not a successful coup against the crown prince in the next days, his follow up move will probably be to purge the Shia clergy of the Eastern Province.

I wish that John Burgess were still active. I’m holding my water until more knowledgeable people comment.

If a study from the Bank of England is to be believed, the “nominal risk-free interest rate” has not been lower in my lifetime nor in my grandfather’s lifetime nor in his grandfather’s lifetime, and so on going back more than 30 generations. That’s got to have implications. What are they?

If they persist at this low a level for an extended period of time, the obvious implication is that everybody’s instincts will be wrong.